1

This chapter was accepted for publication in Ciocca R., Srivastava N. (eds) Indian

Literature and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2017. DOI: 10.1057/978-1-

137-54550-3_3

Reading Together: Hindi, Urdu, and English village novels

Francesca Orsini (SOAS)*

Reading Together

How to do a multilingual history of the novel, and why should we even attempt such

an enterprise? In her essay 'The aesthetics and politics of "reading together"

Moroccan novels in Arabic and French', Karima Laachir lays out the reasons for such

an enterprise in the context of Morocco, and several of her arguments are pertinent to

North India, too. The multilingual literary field in Morocco is largely disconnected

and polarized betweeen Arabic and French, what Abdelfattah Kilito calls ‘split

tongue’ and ‘split literature’. This unproductive dichotomy extends to the study of

Arabic and French literature, which draws upon ideological views of Arabic as the

'national' language and French as 'foreign' (Laachir, 2015: 8). In critical discourse, the

novel has been seen simplistically as a 'foreign import' from French, in the process

obscuring, Laachir argues, both its strong ties to pre-modern Moroccan genres such as

travel-writing, letter-writing and mixed prose, as well as the more complex trajectory

of circulation between Arabic fiction writing in the Mashreq (Egypt and Lebanon in

particular) and the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) (2015: 9-10). Moreover,

while the first generation of post-independence Maghrebi writers in French may have

agonized over their use of the coloniser’s tongue, the following generation assertively

reclaimed French as a Maghrebi language, acculturated and subverted it to serve their

own purposes, not just to 'write back' to the former colonizers but also to

communicate to each other (Laachir, 2015: 6). Finally, while the Arabic novel is

understood as having been shaped by French and other European novels, Maghrebi

novels in French are supposedly untouched by Arabic writing traditions.

All these arguments easily find echo in North India, where Hindi, Urdu, and

English are considered separate literary worlds, a trend that academic study has only

tended to reinforce. Here, too, the 'influence' of English or European literature over

Hindi and Urdu is accepted as systemic, while the suggestion that English literature in

India is affected by literatures in Hindi and Urdu is hardly ever made.

To remedy this unfortunate dichotomy and the blind spots it produces, Laachir

suggests an 'entangled comparative reading' which actively looks for common ground

and traces of mutual influence (2005: 11). She draws attention to the strong

relationship that Moroccan novels in French and Arabic maintain with their 'maternal

culture' and with oral traditions in the context of decolonization, and the dialogue they

establish with each other in aesthetic and social terms (Laachir 2015: 9-11). In the

case of multilingual North India, these are propositions that seem best posed as

* Research for this essay was undertaken as part of the project “Multilingual Locals and Significant

Geographies” funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon

2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 670876.

2

questions and hypotheses rather than as factual statements. So rather than positing that

Hindi, Urdu and Indian English novels have been shaped by the multilingual oral

world and vernacular and oral traditions, and have been in dialogue with one another,

this essay approaches these as questions. Have they been in dialogue with each other?

Do they incorporate the same aspects of the multilingual oral world (which in this

case includes Avadhi, Bhojpuri, Hindi, Urdu, and English), and the same vernacular

and oral traditions? Do they shape the social world in their narratives in similar ways,

or do different concerns and tensions animate and structure them? And finally, to

what extent do we need to read these novels and their generic choices in the context

of the trends and debates within each literary field? The 'entangled comparative

reading' that this essay attempts is therefore one that looks for common ground and

mutual constitution and puts in dialogue novels in the contiguous languages of Hindi,

Urdu and English. Language, education, literary habitus and aesthetics, social

position, literary debates and political currents—all constitute a complex matrix along

which we can read writers’ individual narrative, stylistic and ideological choices.

After outlining the geographical setting of the novels, the essay first briefly

discusses what can be considered a common point of departure, Premchand, before

analysing each novel and ending with an extended comparison.

Purab/Awadh

The focus of this particular comparison is on novels of rural and village life, even

more specifically novels set in the eastern part of the Gangetic plain which goes under

the name of Purab (= East) or, for a slightly more limited area, Awadh. Awadh as a

region was split between rich agricultural tracts, under the control of both Hindu and

Muslim rent-collectors-turned-feudal landowners (zamindars, or larger taluqdars,

rural gentry who were often called Raja whether Hindu or Muslim), and small towns

(qasbas) that were centres of Indo-Persian culture and of Sufi networks attracting

both Hindu and Muslim disciples and pilgrims. In the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries, late-Mughal Iranian Nawabs made Lucknow, their capital, one of the

richest cities in India, a sophisticated and thriving centre of elite craftsmen, traders,

and cultural specialists—including the famous, and famously wealthy, courtesans.†

After decades of increasing fiscal pressure, Awadh was annexed by the East India

Company in 1856, just one year before it was engulfed in the great rebellion of 1857,

whose suppression caused a dramatic physical reconfiguration of the city and the

dispersal of many of its cultural specialists to other centres. In the colonial period,

Awadh became one of the centres of nationalist politics, including the peasant revolt

in 1920-22, but also one of the areas most affected by the Pakistan movement and

Partition, with many of its middle-class and elite Muslims migrating to Pakistan.

After independence, rural Awadh was among the areas most affected by the

legislation abolishing zamindari and by agricultural underdevelopment.‡

† Awadh, the Persian name for Ayodhya, was also the name of a province first under the Delhi Sultans

and then under the Mughals; it became an autonomous sub-imperial region in the eighteenth- and

nineteenth centuries, and it is this Nawabi Awadh, with its capital in Lucknow, that is now remembered

as 'Awadh'. ‡ As Vikram Seth’s novel, A Suitable Boy, explains in detail, security of tenancy and the abolition of

intermediaries between farmers and the state, what became known as zamindari abolition, was already

discussed in the decades before independence, particularly by Congress Socialists. After 1947, this was

one of the first major legislative efforts of Nehru’s Congress government and a central plank of his

prospected land reform, despite the fact that zamindars had joined Congress in great numbers already

before independence and were largely opposed to it. A 'state' rather than central matter, the Zamindari

3

In cultural terms, urban Awadh—the city of Lucknow—has been celebrated

with nostalgia for its sophisticated poetic, musical, and material culture, epitomized

by the glamourous (and glamourized) figure of the courtesan. Rural Awadh, by

contrast/comparison, has been both celebrated for its composite culture (called

Ganga-Jamuni from the meeting of the two rivers) consisting of Hindu-Muslim/Sufi

shared devotion and festivals, and physical culture, and also decried for its

exploitative agrarian, caste, and patriarchal system. Modern attitudes thus range from

nostalgia for its rich and shared aural, ritual and material culture of songs, festivals,

and food, to despair at its chronic underdevelopment and lack of social and gender

justice.

The choice of focusing on Hindi, Urdu, and English novels on rural Awadh in

this essay was not just dictated by expediency, then—the fact that thematic

comparison is always possible and productive even between unrelated texts and

genres. The three novels discussed in this essay were written over the course of thirty

years and focus on different periods in the modern history of rural Awadh.

Shivaprasad Singh’s Hindi novel Alag alag vaitarani [Many Vaitarnis] (1967) is set

in a village in the early 1950s, post-independence and post-zamindari;§ Qazi Abdus

Sattar’s Urdu novel Shab gazida [Bitten by the Night] (1988) is set on a large rural

estate before independence, in the early 1940s;** and Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy

(1993), set in 1951-52, at the cusp of zamindari abolition, features a substantial rural

subplot as one of its parallel narratives. How each novel deals with the zamindari

system and its abolition and with the culture of rural Awadh also signals its relation to

broader issues of national imagination and state-building and the rhetoric of

development in postcolonial India, to issues of caste, gender, and the minoritization of

Muslims, and to particular cultural sensibilities and aesthetics. Does the choice of

realism, for example, carry the same meaning in the Hindi novel from the 1960s, the

1980s Urdu one, and the English one? First, though, it will be useful to consider the

first Hindi-Urdu writer to write systematically about the rural world of north India,

Abolition Act and Land Reform Act of 1951 had to be ratified by the different states legislatures and

was bitterly contested, as the novel also details. Seth espouses the view that the Act had symbolic

rather than real consequences, given that zamindars found ways of circumvent this and the Land

Ceiling Act. It was supposed to have hit harder Muslim zamindars, already in a difficult position after

Partition and the migration of many of them to Pakistan had made their hold on joint family properties

more liable to contestation, as indeed the Seth’s novel shows. In a short story by Qazi Abdus Sattar,

'Malkin', the widow of one such Muslim zamindar, remains alone and destitute in the ancestral home

after independence, assisted only by her faithful old Hindu retainer, Chaudhri Gulab Singh (Sattar 2013

[1977]:13-29). § Other important Hindi novels on the Awadh countryside include Rahi Masum Raza’s Adha gaon

(1966, tr. The Feuding Families of Village Gangauli), which focuses on a clan of Muslim zamindars in

a small qasba in the years of WWII and independence and on the devastating effects of Partition and of

zamindari abolition on their way of life; the novel delights in reproducing the Urdu-mixed Avadhi of

its characters and the traditions of Shi’a festivals. Srilal Shukla’s satirical masterpiece Rag Darbari

(1968), set in a fictional village in the 1960s, punctures both the nationalist glorification of the village

and 'happy peasant' life which grew out of Baden Powell’s idea of 'village republics' and M.K.

Gandhi’s championing of the self-sufficient village community as a counter-model to the corruption of

urban and Western modernity, and Nehruvian plans of rural development, with a hilarious

deconstruction of public speeches and the public campaign posters that exhort villagers to ‘Grow More

Grain’—as if they were perversely unwilling to do so—while showing a healthy farmer and his

contented, laughing wife (2003 [1968]: 57-58). ** 'ye dagh dagh ujala, ye shab gazida sahar' ('this stain-covered daybreak, this night-bitten dawn') is

the first line of Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s poem ‘Subh-e azadi’ ('Freedom’s dawn', 1947), registering the

disappointment that freedom should bring such bitter fruits (Kiernan 1971:123). All translations from

the Hindi and Urdu novels are my own.

4

who remains a necessary reference point for Hindi and Urdu writers writing about the

village and the rural world.††

Premchand

The parallel history of the novel in Hindi and Urdu neatly dovetails in the towering

figure of Premchand (1880-1936), whose substantial output included ten novels and

three hundred-odd short stories. A social realist, he wrote about caste discrimination,

the exploitation of tenant farmers and rural debt, but also fairly sympathetically about

the zamindars caught between increasing demands from the colonial state and the

need to maintain their status. A professional writer and a nationalist, it was probably

in order to reach a wider audience and to secure better income in the quickly

expanding Hindi literary market that Premchand famously switched from writing in

Urdu to first translating his Urdu manuscripts into Hindi and then writing directly in

Hindi—though he always made sure that his novels were published in Urdu, too.

Two of Premchand’s novels deal squarely with the rural world, covering the

whole social range from taluqdars to landless labourers, with parallel plotlines in the

city and the village. Premashram [The Ashram of Love] (1921)‡‡ focuses on a new

generation of absentee zamindars, one of whom feels the need to extract more rural

surplus and cannot afford to be a benevolent paternalist like his father. The tenant

farmers in the village protest against his agent’s abuses until finally one of them kills

him; the court case against them becomes an opportunity to voice their grievances,

and they are acquitted. The novel ends optimistically, with the 'good' zamindar

brother, who had studied agriculture in the USA, founding a rural cooperative.§§

Premchand’s second and more famous rural novel, Godaan [The gift of a cow] (Hindi

1936, Urdu 1939) is even broader in scope, with a notable absence of collective

peasant resistance. Hori, the protagonist, is a tenant farmer who eschews protest and

acquiesces to his exploitation and rapid pauperization, unlike his more vocal wife

Dhaniya.

While astute in terms of social and psychological characterization, Premchand

has been criticized for the 'flatness' of his language and the lack of caste and cultural

specificity:

Written in Khari Boli [modern standard Hindi], Godan had villagers of Uttar

Pradesh speak a language with few inputs from Avadhi, Bhojpuri or Braj that

continued to dominate the spoken universe of north India but were pushed to

the margin by the Khari Boli movement since the late nineteenth century. It

may be claimed that, in Premchand’s world, the region remained devoid of its

†† In an autobiographical essay written in 1991, Shivprasad Singh (b. 1929) recalled that as a student at

Benares Hindu University in the late 1940s he had felt closer to Jayshankar Prasad and the Bengali

novelist Sharat Chandra, or to Tolstoy, Chekhov and Turgenev, than to Premchand, because of

Premchand’s colourless (sapat) language. But, 'when the desire to write something unsaid about the

village awakened, I encountered Premchand. There was really no alternative to him, not then, not now.

For a realist fiction writer, a person who was keen to write about the village, what harbour other than

him was there after all? (1995: 19) ‡‡ Premashram was first written in Urdu as Gosha-e afiya ('A Peaceful Corner', probably between 1918

and 1920, see Goyanka, 1973: 62, 64), though the Hindi version he then prepared was published first

(by Hindi Pustak Agency, Calcutta, ca. 1921); in Urdu it was published in 1928 by Dar al-Ishat,

Lahore. §§ Whether Premashram was inspired by the anti-rent peasant agitation in Awadh in 1919-22, which

Premchand must have known about but which he does not refer directly to, has been intensely debated

(Talwar 1990).

5

own multi-lingual practices, villages emptied of their caste specificities and

their peasant world without their cultural regional moorings (Jha, 2012: 9).

In creating the first novels about rural Awadh, then, Premchand was more

interested in social relationships and the ills within the economic, social, and political

system than in bringing the oral cultural world of the village onto the page.

Moreover, Premchand was scathing in his moral and aesthetic condemnation

of Nawabi culture: even when describing poetic and musical soirées his detachment is

palpable and at times tinged with satire, as in his famous story 'The Chess Players'

(1927). So while it is safe to assume that subsequent Hindi and Urdu writers all read

Premchand (indeed, every Hindi- and Urdu-reading schoolchild does), we shall see

that both Shivprasad Singh and Qazi Abdul Sattar choose quite different strategies.

And while the three authors considered here all had access to the multilingual oral

world of Hindi, Urdu, and English (and in the case of Singh and Abdus Sattar, also

Avadhi and Bhojpuri), the ways in which their novels deal with the spoken world and

the extent to which they incorporate aural traditions depend to a large extent upon the

sensibility and cultural affiliation of each author within their linguistic field.***

The postcolonial Hindi village novel and Alag alag vaitarani

The first decade of the new nation, the 1950s, saw public discourse on the village shift

from one of socio-economic exploitation and injustice due to the zamindari system

and rural debt, to one of economic underdevelopment that required planned action by

the state. The discourse of underdevelopment is pervasive in the Hindi novel Alag

alag vaitarani (1967, but written over a long period), which marks a significant

departure from Premchand’s generic social realism while simultaneously rejecting the

contemporary label of 'regionalist'.

Writing in Hindi about the village in the 1950s meant being classed with the

new literary wave of 'anchalik' novels, a term taken from the title of Phanishwarnath

Renu’s celebrated novel Maila anchal [The Soiled Border] (1954) that came to define

normatively Hindi writing about the rural world. Renu himself had called Maryganj,

the setting of Maila anchal, 'a symbol of all backward villages' (1995 [1954]: 22). But

whereas Renu had then proceeded to show the extreme dynamism at work in the

social and political life of the village, foregrounding the role of caste in politics

decades ahead of political scientists, Hindi literary critics took him at his word. Since

Maila anchal was a choral novel about a remote village in North-East Bihar, far from

the centres of modernization, with no clear protagonist, and built on a cyclical

narrative pattern richly imbued with local folk culture and traditions, anchalik writing

must include these features, in marked contrast to the urban stories of individual

alienation and tense relationships that were instead taken to define literary modernity

in Hindi. Singh himself recalls that at a literary gathering in 1957, authors writing on

the city were called modern, whereas writers on the village were called 'anchalik',

rustic (ganvar) and nostalgic of premodern village economy and culture.††† It was in

*** As G.J.V. Prasad has argued, Indian English writers are not so much translating texts from

vernacular languages into English, as using various strategies to make their works read like translations

(Prasad 1999). ††† In the preface he pleaded: 'However much I try, if readers want to place it in like with anchalik

novels, what can I do? Well, my only request is that if you want to use the term anchalik, do so but

please do not adopt an anchalik vision'—by which he meant judging the novel according to anchalik

criteria. Yet this is exactly what happened: one critic compared Singh’s novel to Renu and found it

6

fact in order to break with this anchalik 'nostalgia' (sammohan), Singh claims, that he

wrote Alag alag vaitarani.‡‡‡

Vaitarni is the mythological river flowing between heaven and hell, a river

which righteous people see filled with nectar and sinners filled with blood. But in the

preface, Shivprasad Singh proposed a new interpretation: if according to mythology

the Vaitarni river was formed by Shiva’s tears after the death of his beloved wife Sati,

these are the tears of a

crazed, exiled, distressed Shiva fighting against the organized injustice of the

mob […] Whenever the quality of auspiciousness (shivatva) is trampled,

individuals are deprived of their rights, and truth and justice are disregarded,

then the tears of many different people (jan-jan) become a stream which turns

into the Vaitarni. It becomes the river of hell. (1967: np)

While the shallow river of the village where the novel is set, one of countless

'lightless villages' (nachiragi mauza), cannot aspire to this grandeur, its many stories

of injustice, hardship, and deprivation together create 'many Vaitarnis.'§§§ What has

turned these rural communities into 'lightless villages'? 'Floods, upheavals, war,

drought, famine, or something else?' The question is left unanswered here, but it is

unaswered in the course of the novel by the strong critique of social disunity and

economic stagnation voiced by the positive characters, as we shall see.

Alag alag vaitarani is a sprawling novel of almost seven hundred pages,

recalling the 1500-odd pages of A Suitable Boy. Like Maila anchal it is a choral

novel, with a large cast of characters, and a shifting point of view. Initially the

viewpoint is that of Bullu Pandit, a naïve and obliging poor Brahmin who acts as

messenger and general dogsbody and introduces many of the characters at the local

fair in the leisurely and crowded first chapter.**** Though of high caste, Bullu is one

of the many villagers who used to be regular retainers of the zamindars and now has

to fend for himself after the abolition of zamindari. Zamindari abolition has not

translated into a redistribution of land among farmers but has dramatically altered the

balance of power in the village, and loosened or severed feudal patronage

relationships between the leading zamindar, Bujharath, who lives in the fort-like

mansion (chhavni) at the top of the village, and their erstwhile 'subjects' (praja-pauni)

in the village: 'earlier all of Karaita’s roads led to the chavni' (1967: 47), Bullu thinks,

now not anymore:††††

lacking—in folk songs, a clearly delineated local culture, the chirruping of birds (a Renu signature

note), village proverbs, and the beauty of nature (Singh, 1995: 20). ‡‡‡ In fact, the novel does include a range of linguistic registers, particularly of Bhojpuri, the local

dialect spoken by a number of characters, and a number of verses and songs. §§§ Alag alag means 'many', but its distributive sense implies that these are many different and separate

streams: in other words, in the village the individual stories of injustice and deprivation do not add up

to a collective struggle but dissipate in personal tragedies. **** When Vipin comes in after almost 100 pages, it looks like he will be the main focalizer, but the

viewpoint shifts again in the following chapter. Vipin’s is not the privileged viewpoint. †††† On his part, the leading zamindar Bujharath refuses to perform ritual duties, such as feeding all his

retainers khichri on the occasion of Makar Sankranti when they return from bathing in the Ganges: 'A

stupid trouble' (wahiyat jhamela), 'Forget about it' (maro goli), 'What’s the point of that display

(dikhava)? Are we the only ones to carry on ritual customs (rasm-rivaj)? If village people have stopped

paying obeisance (salami) and bringing gifts (nazrana), why shoud we continue with all this?', he tells

his wife (1967:456).

7

Times are changing fast. The ancestral solid walls of zamindari are falling

down with a gentle push. The whole environment of Karaita is changing in

front of one’s eyes. Tenants have set aside familiar ties of obligation

(khandani laj-sharam) and broken off relations with the chhavni. Now you no

longer have tenants queuing up at Dusehra to come and pay their respects

(juhar). Nor does the large tray lying at the gate of the chhavni ever tinkle

with the coins they offered as gifts. Ahirs have completely stopped giving

milk and curds, Koiris have stopped bringing fresh vegetables, Mallahs fish,

Julahas chickens and Gareris goats with their salams. This is why at the

chhavni they no longer any need to celebrate these occasions with festivities,

and whitewash and clean the place. (1967: 32)

Bujharath’s wife, Kaniya, acts as a kind of moral sentinel of the village to mitigate her

husband’s abuses behind the scenes, though she is ultimately not more effective than

the virtuous mother in Shab gazida.

Almost every chapter brings in a new character and their story. For example

Khalil Miyan or Khalil chacha, practically the only Muslim left in the village,‡‡‡‡

formerly a wealthy farmer and now a 'defeated man', he tells Vipin: his sons have left

(one for Pakistan), and farming has become less and less profitable. This is not

directly the effect of zamindari abolition, he claims, but of land tax which forced him

to borrow from his Yadav herdsman and ploughman, who then tricked him out of his

lands with the help of the land record-keeper, the patwari.§§§§ Singh skillfully shifts

language registers to represent not just idiolects but 'character zones' and caste

lifeworlds—Khalil Miyan’s Urdu, Vipin’s complex thought processes, the brash

Yadav policeman Jagesar’s abuse-rich Hinglish, young Dalit servant Ghurbinva, and

so on.*****

Three educated youth stand out as representatives of Nehruvian nationalism

and developmental discourse, and promise to be ethical agents of socio-economic as

well as narrative action. Two are from the village: Bujharath’s younger brother Vipin,

who has returned after an MA in History, and dagdar (doctor) Devnath, who disgusts

his Brahmin father by curing low-caste people in the village instead of setting up a

lucrative business in the nearby town. The third is an outsider, the new teacher

Shashikant. He initially challenges his superior’s view that being posted to Karaita

means being 'dumped' in a 'wasteland' (though he himself talks of the village as a

'dead' and 'wretched place', murda… sariyal jagah, 1967: 175). On his first day in

Karaita, the children’s faces strike him as innocent but also hopeless, and though he

sounds enthusiastic and encouraging to them, two months later he reiterates that the

school and the village are 'dead', and school life is listless and dull (in English, 1967:

182) and wonders how he can inject life into them. Shashikant is constantly

discouraged by the mockery of his headmaster, a seasoned teacher who uses corporal

punishment, does not believe in hard work or stimulating the children, and in fact

abuses them sexually (something a disgusted Shashikant finds out but does not

report). Shashikant’s experiment at using cricket for nation-building seems successful

at first: in a few months the school acquires a flower garden and a sports pitch, and

‡‡‡‡ The tokenistic presence of the benevolent Muslim chacha, uncle, was a constant in Hindi films of

the 1950s. §§§§ This conversation between Khalil Miyan and Vipin offers the only chance in the novel to discuss

the past and present of Hindu-Muslim relations in the village. ***** 'Character zone' for Bakhtin is 'the field of action for a character’s voice' which extends 'beyond

the boundaries of the direct discourse allotted to him' (Bakhtin, 1981: 316, 320).

8

with some basic equipment the schoolchildren train and take part in tournaments, with

a new sparkle on their faces. But Shashikant’s experiment ends badly: one day he’s

badly beaten and robbed by one of the villagers and decides to leave on the spot. This

is emblematic of the other educated would-be modernisers—they all leave.

Three critical events punctuate the flow of individual narratives. The first sets

up expectations of Vipin as a man of strong feeling and bold action. Chachiya, an old

retainer of Bujharath’s mother left with no means of support and unable to pay her

debts after her husband’s debilitating illness, is threatened with eviction by Bujharath,

who is sending his righthand man Khuda Bakhsh with the bailiff. This is a profound

breach of village solidarity and the fictive kinship between the two families, and other

principled villagers are appalled ('the poor man’s house burns and the villain warms

his hands,' as the proverb goes, 1967: 113). Chachiya’s daughter Pushpa, a childhood

playmate (balhiya) of Vipin, defies modesty and begs Vipin to save them. Profoundly

ashamed at his brother’s action, Vipin borrows the sum from Kaniya without telling

her what it is for. The gesture awakens a storm of feelings within him, and Vipin and

Pushpa start secretly caring for each other.

The second critical event indicts the sexual predatoriness of the zamindari

system (as in Shab gazida), destroys Vipin’s romance, and punctures our expectations

of Vipin. Not content with having a young Dalit mistress, his brother Bujharath plans

to kidnap Pushpa, while his rival Surju hopes to catch him red-handed and have him

arrested and publicly shamed. Informed just in time, Vipin, rushes to stop Bujharath

from committing the deed and falling in the trap. Bujharath hurts his head badly as he

flees, and in order to cover up the incident in front of the villagers and of Kaniya,

Vipin claims that it was he who hit Bujharath in a quarrel. Pushpa and Vipin are now

caught in separate nightmares: Pushpa’s that Vipin may think she was complicit in the

plan, Vipin’s that his reputation before the village and before Kaniya has been

tarnished—how could he hit his elder brother?—and that he cannot hope to bring

home Pushpa as his wife. As in Shab gazida, the educated youth’s romance is blocked

by a family elder. Vipin is reminded of a story his mother used to tell him of a queen

whose husband had ordered her to fetch a flower under the sea for a dom to whom he

had lost at cards.††††† After a tender and desperate meeting with Pushpa, Vipin

remembers the end of the story: the dom grasped the queen and pulled her to his

palace under the sea, her cries leaving echoes—who will save her? (1967: 422). Later,

when her parents arrange for Pushpa’s marriage to another man and she is desperate

to see Vipin once more, he stays away. Vipin’s cowardice with Pushpa marks him out

as a weak man, someone too compromised by his own family and class to be an

effective agent of change.

The final critical event, towards the end of the novel, is a violent confrontation

between Dalit labourers and high-caste Thakurs due to the high-castes’ sexual

exploitation of Dalit women. The conflict leads to the death of the wise leader of the

itinerant Dalit labour gang, Sarup Bhagat, and confirms the village as a site of

unredeemed injustice. Once again, Vipin is called upon to intervene and stop the

violence ('It’s a frightening flood, bhaiya, stop it. You are the only one who can stop

it. Everyone will listen to you,' Jaggan Misir urges him, 1967: 605) but does not—this

time because Kaniya stops him.

Alag alag vaitarani contains lyrical natural descriptions and a great feel for

local vocabulary and expressions, justifying Singh’s criticism of Premchand’s

language. Yet in opposition to the celebration of the village in Gandhian nationalism,

††††† A dom is a man who deals with cremating corpses, a job considered extremely polluting.

9

the attitude towards it is one of despair. 'Nothing can change in this village' several

characters reiterate, echoing the 'lightless village' (nachiragi mauza) of the preface.

This critique of village underdevelopment has an economic side to it and a moral one.

Jaggan Misir aptly sums up the economic issues when Vipin also decides to leave the

village:

'You’re leaving, Vipin Babu, go. Nobody will blame you for it. Our villages

these days have only one way—out. Out, and out only. Whoever is good, who

can do something, leaves. Good grain, milk, ghee, vegetables leave. Good

healthy cattle, cows and buffaloes, sheep and goats, leave. Strong healthy

men, with strength in their bodies and energy in their limbs, are drawn away to

the paltan, the police, the maletari [military], the mills. Then how can people

with brains, educated people, stay? They will also go. They’ll have to go. I am

not sorry about them […]' (1967: 674).‡‡‡‡‡

The young men instead use the language of moral and physical sickness.

According to doctor Devnath’s words, 'unmanliness, weakness, impotence are the

new illnesses' (1967: 437); for Vipin, 'there is probably no village as badnam, poor,

wretched, and sick as Karaita. No decent man can live here.' For Shashikant 'it’s

human beings who have become narrower than before—in their thinking, their hearts

and minds, their bodies, and actions' (1967: 444). Is their moral language itself proof

of their inability to mobilise the villagers and intervene in the socio-economic

structure? Interestingly, it is not the abolition of zamindari, or the political greed of

post-independence Congress, which are the problems in Alag alag vaitarni, unlike A

Suitable Boy. It is the lack of rural employment and the decline in social and moral

solidarity that will stop caste, gender, and economic abuse, which are hollowing the

village from within.

The novel’s plot arc resembles that of Qazi ‘Abdul Sattar’s later Urdu novel

Shab gazida (1984). Set before Independence, with taluqdars still economically and

socially dominant and at the centre of the narrative, Shab gazida features a similar

internecine struggle within the zamindari family and a young educated hero who

wants to bring about change but is—tragically—prevented from it. Yet whereas Alag

alag vaitarani is unnostalgic about the old feudal culture of rural Awadh, much of

Shab gazida’s textual pleasure comes from evoking precisely that culture.

Shab gazida

Qazi ‘Abdul Sattar (1933-) is known in Urdu mostly for his historical fiction, and his

novel on rural Awadh, Shab gazida (1988) can qualify as one such work. The action

never moves far from the estate, with the main house (dyorhi, lit. 'threshhold') and the

takht (platform, throne) on the main verandah at its core. All the named characters

belong to the taluqdar estate of Mirza Nawab of Jamnagar and are in some kinship or

subordinate relation to him, from humble servants to local strongmen and other feudal

lords.

‡‡‡‡‡ And he continues: 'Yes bhai, they used to leave earlier, too. Often, it was those who could not find

work or who feared the abuses (jor-julum) of the zamindars and ran away. But not it’s a new kind of

endless outflow (anat gaun). Now the only ones who remain are those who do not want to stay but

cannot go anywhere. And those who leave are the ones who want to remain but cannot stay' (675).

10

The meandering geographical description that opens the short novel sets the

stage in terms of physical and built environment, significant historical markers, and

social world. From the nearby railway station, the road marked by the tracks of heavy

cartloads of sugarcane and grain winds its way through a forest, passing by the site of

a British cemetery of 1857. Here two local Muslim and Hindu Rajas (one the

grandfather of the current Nawab Mirza, the Raja of Jamnagar) fought together

against Col. Thomson, a battle still retold by genealogists (both Muslim mirasis and

Hindu bhats) at weddings. The old fort was razed to the ground by the British after

the rebellion, but here begin the orchards and fields of the current Raja of Jamnagar.

After the bustling village of Jamnagar, with its built market (ganj), weekly bazaar,

and Mughal mosque, the description of the walled Jamnagar estate (garhi) evokes

Mughal architecture and courtliness. First come the elephant and horse stables, then

two gates with armed guards surmounted by a naubatkhana (where the ceremonial

drum and other instruments are played on special occasions), then outbuildings for

clerks and accountants, various reception halls, and finally the ceremonial building

(shish mahal, house of mirrors), on whose verandah stands the takht of the Raja,

Mirza Sahab, where he receives visitors and pleaders.

This is a rural world where Muslim and Hindu landowners fight and party

together, where both Muslims and Hindus celebrate Muharram and Holi, where

Muslim Rajas have Hindu armed guards aplenty and never go out unaccompanied,

and where the wealthy moneylender and estate superintendents may fleece the Raja

but scrupulously retain a deferential demeanour. Everything in the estate, and in the

novel, revolves around Mirza Sahab, who may have left the running of the estate to

his superintendent, the clever Rehmat Ali Khan, but will not relinquish control or

admit insubordination, even from his son, Jimmy. Mirza Sahab is depicted as the

quintessential feudal lord: highly conscious of his status, paternalistic and tyrannical,

sexually exploitative, selfish and shrewd in words and actions. Keen to retain

autonomy from British interference, he unwittingly shelters his wife’s nephew

Akhtar, a revolutionary on the run from the police after a bomb case—practically the

only echo in the novel of the wider world of politics.§§§§§

Much of the pleasure of the novel comes from the loving descriptions of the

material world of the dyorhi and its elaborate aesthetics—pandans and spittoons of

various metals and alloys, food and clothing, refined allusive speech.****** Every meal

takes place among a profusion of trays, plates, and bowls, with watchful servants

handing towels, untying shoelaces, setting down and removing food.†††††† Unlike Alag

alag vaitarani, we are not privy to characters’ thoughts but only to their movements

and controlled speech, and this makes us pay attention to any clue their careful

performances may reveal.

The story moves slowly. Young, Colvin College-educated Jimmy is back from

Lucknow, keen to remedy the breach between his father and uncle, a nearby taluqdar

married to Nawab Mirza’s sister, and marry their daughter Zubeida (who was

§§§§§ Shab gazida is unusual among the other novels on rural Awadh in paying hardly any attention to

nationalist politics: Jimmy’s uncle is also a loyalist and Jimmy himself does not hesitate to involve the

British Resident in order to stop a dispute between his father and a neighbouring Raja over a point of

etiquette from escalating. ****** In terms of language registers, Shab gazida differentiates between the chaste Urdu spoken by all

the elite characters and the Awadhi-inflected speech of the Rajput guards and of the women servants,

though see below. †††††† This emphasis on description of the material culture of a lost world is something the novel shares

with S.R. Faruqi’s novel Chand tare sar-e asman (another poetic quote for a title, 2006, translated as

The Mirror of Beauty, 2013).

11

educated at home by a British governess). Jimmy is even keener to wrestle control of

the estate from Rehmat Ali Khan—who has quietly been making a profit from side

deals and expanding his clout. As a local ruffian explains, 'Chote sarkar [the junior

lord] is English educated. His style is quite different from bare sarkar’s. He keeps

account of each guava and phalenda,‡‡‡‡‡‡ while bare sarkar has no head for even

elephants and horses' (1988: 46). Jimmy plans agricultural reform for the estate, cares

less for supremacy and more for cooperation with neighbouring Hindu taluqdars, and

is aware that nationalist politics will threaten their hold on the land, something his

father angrily refuses to even contemplate.

But in order to acquire control over the estate, the estate accounts, and the

keys to the treasury, Jimmy, who is already formally the heir, has to break Rehmat Ali

Khan’s hold over Mirza Sahab. As Jimmy explains to his childhood friend Chaudhri

Bedhab Singh, a roguish but fiercely loyal Thakur from a nearby village, the real

threat comes from within his own house. The story advances like a game of chess,

with Jimmy and Rehmat Ali Khan exchanging moves while Mirza Sahab, who sides

with his superintendent against his own son, nevertheless does not stop Jimmy’s

interventions. Together, Jimmy and Bedhab shrewdly dodge Rehmat Ali Khan’s

threats and are apparently successful in neutralizing him. But in the dramatic

denouement, Mirza Sahab commits filicide by coldly feeding Jimmy a poisoned

sweet. As in Alag alag vaitarani, we are initially led to expect that the educated youth

will bring about change—here in the running of the estate and in feudal sexual

politics, there in the economic development and social transformation of the village,

but the expectations of change and of purposeful action are frustrated.

While the only thing that the Hindi novel Alag alag vaitarani bemoaned about

the loss of zamindari was its patronage that strengthened the social fabric of the

village, Shab gazida is poised in a tension between condemning the sexual

exploitation and lawlessness of Mirza Sahab’s feudal lord and a loving recreation of

the rich material, social, and cultural world of feudal rural Awadh, which even

modern English-educated Jimmy does not disavow—and which Muslims lost after

Partition. We can read Shab gazida’s filicide as a statement about the suicidal

unwillingness of the Muslim-dominated feudal system of Awadh to renew itself.

Partition and zamindari abolition will do the rest.

Yet it is not Nawabi Lucknow that Sattar longs for and evokes in this Urdu

novel—Urdu poetry is notable for its absence, and courtesan performances, which

represent the fulcrum of Nawabi culture in A Suitable Boy and are completely absent

from Alag alag vaitarani, occur frequently here but are only mentioned in passing. It

is rather the lost material world of rural Awadh, with its history of social ties between

Muslim and Hindu taluqdars and between Muslim taluqdars and their Hindu

retainers, and its expressive multilinguality of Urdu and Avadhi.§§§§§§ While the

young educated male characters speak English or Urdu with each other, their ability

to speak Awadhi is an asset they use for social cohesion.******* The loss of both these

elements—Hindu-Muslim interdependence and Urdu-Avadhi multilinguality—, the

novel signals, was a loss for Indian Muslims but also for the postcolonial nation and

its culture.

‡‡‡‡‡‡ a kind of large jamun fruit. §§§§§§ It is marsiyas (dirges) in the local dialect on popular tunes that women sing for Moharram (Sattar

2014: 120), not the famous and elaborate Urdu ones of Lucknow poets Mir Anis and Dabir. ******* Significant here is a scene between Jimmy, the young Muslim taluqdar who is the protagonist,

and the mother of his Hindu neighbour, with whom he speaks familiarly in Avadhi (Sattar 2014:143).

12

With its much more selective celebration of music and Urdu poetry as

nostalgic symbols of Awadh culture, its strategic splitting between the benevolent

paternalism of the Nawab of Baitar and the exploitative cruelty of Rasheed’s uncouth

petty-zamindar elders, and its distancing descriptions of the village as a cultural,

social, and economic wasteland, A Suitable Boy reveals a much greater distance from

this rural world.

A Suitable Boy

'The rural theme has attracted scant attention in scholarship on the Indian novel in

English, largely because the setting of Indian novels in English themselves is more

often urban than rural. Nevertheless, rural concerns are represented in Indian literature

in English', writes Angela Eyre in her comparative study of rural Hindi and English

novels (2004: 12; 2005). In common with Hindi novels, she notes, English novels on

rural north India treat the agrarian theme politically, thematise the ambivalent

involvement of the Congress party and its veniality after independence, and have at

least one zamindar who is a member of the Congress party but sides with the

peasants. In A Suitable Boy, this is the State minister in charge of the Zamindari

Abolition Act, Mahesh Kapoor.

As Eyre has noted, the rural plotline occupies four parts of this sprawling

novel. First, the arrival of Mahesh Kapoor’s wayward son Maan at the village of

Debaria with his Urdu tutor Rasheed, the son of local petty zamindars. Maan has been

'exiled' for a month from the city as a kind of punishment for his persistent attachment

to the courtesan Saeeda Bai.††††††† In Debaria boredom and heat almost drive him

insane. But outgoing Maan cannot help but meeting and observing the assorted local

characters, and it is through his descriptions that we readers encounter the village. He

also meets the young and dynamic Bengali Sub-Divisional Officer Sandeep Lahiri,

who delights Maan by taking him on a hunting expedition. This brings him to the

nearby town of Baitar and the almost empty dyorhi of his father’s friend the Nawab of

Baitar, where only a few retainers live. When Maan returns to Debaria and Baitar

with his father Mahesh Kapoor during the latter’s campaign for the first general

elections, his father is surprised at Maan’s local knowledge and the goodwill he has

earned among the local population. However, Maan’s ill-fated stabbing of his good

friend Firoze, the son of the Nawab of Baitar, sets the local independent candidate

Waris, a retainer of the Nawab’s, against Mahesh Kapoor, and by spreading the

rumour that Firoze has died Waris manages to sway the elections—there are

indications that he will become a new breed of cunning politician.

Given that the Zamindari Abolition Act of 1951 plays a central role in the

novel, occupying significant narrative space even in the chapters dedicated to

Brahmpur, the extensive rural subplot allows Seth to connect the Congress high

politics in the state and at the national level (the Legislative Assembly debates in

Brahmpur) and the urban elites with the social world beyond them—the rural world of

petty zamindars (like Rasheed’s family), land record-keepers, and labouring peasants.

Even Nehru comes to speak to Baitar and Salimpur (1993: 1351ff)! The subplot

connects—and highlights the yawning gap between—static life in the village and

modern life in the city (despite futher differences between Brahmapur and Calcutta).

It also connects the official machinery of the state (the Legislative Assembly, again)

††††††† Maan’s feelings towards the village are almost unremittingly negative, and the term 'exile' recurs

more than once. Only at the end of his stay he acknowledges that he has developed some fondness for

Debaria—and in turn the villagers have become fond of him.

13

with its actual, much more limited functioning on the ground, despite the SDO’s

energy and good intentions. Yet, as with all realist novels that seek to capture the

entirety of the social world, what we get is a particular and selective construction of

reality.

As Eyre has pointed out, the village of Debaria is described and narrated

almost exclusively through Maan’s eyes. He sees it as utterly uncomfortable,

unspeakably dull and oppressive, devoid of any history, vitality and attraction beyond

occasionally natural beauty. The descriptions of the stations along the railway line, of

Debaria, or of the nearby qasba of Salimpur are all generic:

Every fifteen minutes or so the train stopped at a small railway station,

sometimes in the middle of nowhere, sometimes in a village. Very

occasionally it would halt at a small town, the headquarters of a subdivision of

the district they were travelling through. A mosque or a temple, a few neem or

pipal or banyan trees, a boy driving goats along a dusty track, the sudden

turquoise of a kingfisher—Maan vaguely registered these. (1993: 542)

The point here is not that this description is not effective in conveying Maan’s

unfamiliar and detached gaze (it is), but that this is the only kind of description that

we get in the rural subplot, which is much less vivid and animated than the urban

sections of the novel.

Once in Debaria, there is little village life beyond the occasional dull visitors

and pigheaded factionalism. Instead of the collective life of caste groups and village

friendships, with their conflicts, ritual occasions and social and cultural life, instead of

politicized tenant farmers, we have the solitary and largely silent Dalit labourer

Kachheru, whose very silence marks his disempowerment. 'It is a sign of his lack of

power in this novel peopled with garrulous characters that Kachheru very rarely

speaks', Eyre notes (2004: 213). Even Rasheed, who resembles the educated youth in

the other novels, unlike them is completely alone and pursues a purely individual

course of action that antagonises his family and ends in complete failure. His view of

the village is of utter waste, and he holds his family directly responsible.

A Suitable Boy is keenly attuned to Nehru’s rhetoric of development, tied as it

was to industrialization versus agricultural modes of production, and to the

progressive state as an agent of 'reform' vis-à-vis traditional society. In the rural sub-

plot, the postcolonial state discourse of development-cum-paternalistic-care is

embodied in the young SDO, the young English-educated IAS officer Sandip Lahiri, a

Sub-Divisional Officer on his first posting who is clearly set apart from the rural

population he’s administering and yet earnestly preoccupied with their welfare.‡‡‡‡‡‡‡

By contrast, the Muslim taluqdar and Hindu zamindar/Congress minister are absentee

landlords, and the local petty zamindars only seek to minimise the consequences of

zamindari abolition and, like local Congress politicians, are not interested in investing

in and transforming the rural economy. Tenant farmers are absent from Seth’s

narrative. As for Maan, he could not be less interested in socio-economic action and

reform.

‡‡‡‡‡‡‡ Lahiri reads Howards End and listens to Mozart and Beethoven, disdains politicians and is

reasonable and balanced: when he explains to Maan that the wolves are forced out of the forests by

deforestation, he says 'very sad. Sad for the villagers, sad for the wolves' (1993: 679). His awkward but

surprisingly popular speech at the Republic Day celebration mirrors Nehru’s performance towards the

end of novel.

14

With respect to the feudal culture of Awadh, the novel embodies (and

contains?) it almost exclusively in two figures: the Nawab of Baitar, who is unwilling

and unable to stem post-Partition and post-abolition decline and withdraws into the

library.§§§§§§§ And Saeeda Bai, a consummate performer of the song genres of

Hindustani music, ghazals, khyal, thumris and thappas. With Saeeda—again focalized

through Maan—this very anglocentric novel engages most passionately with the non-

English world of Urdu poetry and endowes it with cultural value.******** Maan’s

dialogues with Saeeda are supposedly in Urdu, 'translated' in English in a flowery

style; he recruits Rasheed and acquiesces to the exile in Debaria for the sake of

learning Urdu and becoming literate in it. He delights in the nickname Saeeda has

given him, Dagh (lit. brand, mark, blemish), a typical Urdu poetic penname. As in the

case of the singer Ustad Majeed Khan, descriptions of Saeeda’s performances are

genuinely full of admiration. And she is sympathetically portrayed as trying to

manage her transition as an elite woman performer in this post-feudal world.

If A Suitable Boy engages with the culture of Awadh, then, it is only in terms

of a distillation of Hindustani music and Urdu poetry, and that too largely in urban

settings. (Maan finds no sympathetic teacher of Urdu love poetry in Debaria.)

Saeeda’s Baitar performances are mentioned only in the past tense, and in fact she

performs publicly only once in the novel, at Mahesh Kapoor’s Holi celebrations early

on, though she still entertains private clients who belong to the old elites. In Debaria

or Baitar, there are no community festivals depicted, no radical Bhakti poetry, no

Hindi education and intellectual life of any kind, barring political speeches.††††††††

This makes the gap between the city—with its University and student life, Legislative

Assembly and High Court, its English-educated middle classes, bookshops and

Shakespearean theatricals—and the village of Debaria and qasba of Baitar with very

little to speak of for themselves, even at a human level, even wider. 'How distant these

worlds appeared' (1993: 723), thinks Maan, and while this is partly the result of his

view, there is nothing, apart from the instrumental electioneering, that suggests

otherwise.

Conclusion: Reading the novels together

An 'entangled comparative reading' of these three novels helps us bring into better

focus how their depiction of rural Awadh can be read along the complex matrix of

language, education, literary habitus and aesthetics, social position, language-specific

literary debates and political current. While it would be simplistic to identify these

§§§§§§§ The novel is more ambivalent towards the Nawab’s sister-in-law and Muslim League politician

Begum Abida Khan, who campaigns in favour of retaining Urdu as a state language in the Legislative

Assembly and argues against the Zamindari Abolition Act which, she argues, will mean the end of

Awadh culture—‘it is we zamindars who have made this province what it is—who made it strong, who

gave it its special flavour’ (1993: 307). As a fearless, and the only, female politician in the novel she

earns our admiration, but as a communalist who makes instrumental use of her community’s minority

status while she herself is an economic parasite and is disinvested from that culture, her shrill voice of

opposition does not find favour with the novel’s overall perspective (see also Srivastava 2008: 55-56). ******** The only aural traditions referenced are the devotional song (bhajan) at gentle Mrs Kapoor’s

funeral, uth ja muazfir, Rise traveller, which is translated in full (1993: 1336), and the wedding songs

before Lata’s marriage, which are paraphrased (1993: 1459-60). By contrast, English poetry is quoted

profusely throughout. Among Hindi genres, apart from the bhajan, the only genre references is the

political speech (e.g. the Congress Socialist’s candidate, 1993: 1278-83). †††††††† Maan’s tiger-hunting expedition with the Deputy Collector—who has organized it not as a

colonial sport but in order to rid local villagers of a man-killer—is a curious conflation of Raj and

Awadh tropes, and ends inconclusively.

15

different positions as determined by the language the novels are written in, language

and cultural affiliation do go some way towards providing a key to how they construct

their social and aesthetic worlds.

So despite its claim not to be an anchalik novel, Alag alag vaitarani partly

reproduces the anchalik departure from Premchand’s social realism by giving voice to

a large number of village characters and refusing the lure of having the educated

young as protagonists and agents (like Maila anchal, and unlike Nagarjun’s Nai

Paudh). In line with Marxist analyses of the time, the novel develops a critique of

economic, caste, sexual and human injustice and underdevelopment, and indulges in

no nostalgic description of the feudal culture of the past: the chhavni, the equivalent

to Shab gazida’s dyorhi or A Suitable Boy’s Baitar Fort, is never recalled in its past

glory, nor are there any mentions of nautch or musical performances. The aural

traditions referenced are rather the devotional song-poems of Kabir and Shivnarayan,

the oral epic Chandayani, and other songs. Khalil chacha is the only character in Alag

alag vaitarani to quote Urdu poetry.

But Urdu poetry is also interestingly absent from Shab gazida, which prefers

to mention rural Muharram celebrations, as well as Nautanki popular theatre at

Dussehra 'for the sake of the Hindu subjects' (Sattar, 1988: 63). It is this difference

from the urban Nawabi culture of Lucknow, with which Urdu is regularly associated

(as indeed it is in A Suitable Boy), that interests Sattar.

What is at stake in these depictions of the village and rural life is their place in

national imagination and postcolonial state-building. While Alag alag vaitarani is a

novel about contemporary life and Shab gazida and A Suitable Boy are historical

novels, all of them are concerned with the future of the rural world and its

possibilities (or lack of them). For Shab gazida, spatially still centred on the dyorhi,

the future is the end of this interconnected feudal world, a dream of independence

stained by the night of partition, as in Faiz’s poem. For Alag alag vaitarani and A

Suitable Boy, the future of the rural world in post-independent India is bleak, despite

the rhetoric of development. Yet if this is a 'lightless village', the Hindi novel

suggests, it is nonetheless rich with humanity, no longer centred on the zamindars’

chhavni but among the smaller people of the village. Rural development—or rather

the lack of it—is at the heart of Alag alag vaitarani, intensely debated by the villagers

and enacted by narratives of individual unemployment, impoverishment, and out-

migration. No specific sense of the village—apart from a month of exile or a

constituency for the urban characters—emerges in A Suitable Boy, whose centre of

gravity is definitely the Hindu urban middle class. Here socio-economic

underdevelopment is unrelieved by any cultural life or village community. While

stemming from a different position vis-à-vis the rural world, then, Seth is just as, if

not more, negative about rural development as Singh. But what for Singh is an open

and burning question, for Seth is a historical fact.

So do these Hindi, Urdu, and English novels share any common ground, do

they draw upon common aesthetics, ideas, and sensibilities? Both Alag alag vaitarani

and Shab gazida are attuned to local speech, rural song and poetic repertoires, and

village fairs and festivals, though for different reasons, as explained above. But

whereas Urdu is the default language of educated intercourse among Muslims and

Hindus, Urdu is almost completely absent from Alag alag vaitarani, and diglossia

here is between modern standard Hindi (which the educated characters and the

narrator use) and the local dialect, Bhojpuri, apart from a few English words of

common use. As we have seen, Seth’s English-centric novel bypasses village culture,

village speech (with a tiny exception) and Hindi completely, and focuses on Urdu

16

poetry, Hindustani music, and the figure of the courtesan as emblems of the passing

culture of Awadh. Despite their different takes on zamindari, then, the Hindi and

Urdu novels valorise the oral culture and social interdependence of rural Awadh,

which the English novel does not see it, and both the Urdu and English novels express

nostalgia for the social and material sophistication of the zamindari elite. So while all

three novels are invested in secularism and Hindu-Muslim coexistence, their social

imaginations differ starkly.

Finally, while all three novels can be categorized as realist, their realism

differs significantly in texture and aim. Alag alag vaitarani’s realism focuses (unlike

Premchand’s) on the specificity of idiolect and village speech, on descriptions of local

nature, and on inner dilemmas and dialogues. Shab gazida’s is an evocation of the

past, and as we have seen focuses on the surfaces of material culture and the repeated

and ritualized gestures of established socio-cultural practice. A Suitable Boy has been

characterized as a 'return' to realism after Rushdie’s postmodern pastiche and Seth’s

own cosmopolitan novel in sonnets (The Golden Gate, 1986); its realism consists of a

omniscient and distant narrator balancing carefully between particularized description

and typification (the village hut, the railway station, the peasant), and offering quick-

brush character depictions and equally swift comments about each idiolect. This very

broad range of characters and lifeworld and the authorial balance and control

resemble in scope not just George Eliot, to which Seth has been compared, but also

Premchand. Thus, whereas in the 1950s Shivprasad Singh moved away from

Premchand’s rural novels, an inevitable reference for anyone writing on the village in

Hindi and Urdu even now, forty years after him Seth’s sweep, relative distance, and

pessimism about the rural world ironically bring him close to Premchand’s last novel,

Godan (1936).

9500 words ca.

References

Abdul Sattar, Q. (2013 [1977]) Pital ka ghanta. Delhi: Educational Publishing House.

Abdul Sattar, Q. (2014 [1988]) Shab gazida, Delhi: Educational Publishing House.

Abdul Sattar, Q. and Rashid A.R (2014) Qazi abdussattar, asrar o guftar. Delhi:

Arshiyah Publications, 2014.

Bakhtin, M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: four essays, edited by Michael

Holquist and translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University

of Texas Press.

Datta, A. (1987) Encyclopaedia of Indian Literature, Vol. 1, Delhi: Sahitya Akademi.

Eyre, A. (2004) 'Land as Legislative Space in Vikam Seth’s A Suitable Boy and

Phanishwarnath Renu’s Mailā ãncal'', in Prasad, G.J.V., ed.Vikram Seth: An

Anthology of Recent Criticism, Delhi: Pencraft International, pp. 142-151.

Eyre, A. (2005) Land, language and literary identity : a thematic comparison of

Indian novels in Hindi and English. Unpublished PhD, SOAS, University of London.

17

Faruqi, S.R. (2006) Chand tare sar-e asman. New Delhi: Penguin. Translated by the

author as The Mirror of Beauty, New Delhi: Penguin, 2013.

Ghiyasuddin, M. (2006) Naz̲r-i qāzī ʻabdussattār. Delhi: Educational Publishing

House.

Goyanka, K.K. (1973) Prem Chand's Craftsmanship in His Novels. Delhi and

Allahabad: Saraswati Press.

Jha, S. (2012) 'Visualising a Region: Phanishwarnath Renu and the Archive of the

"Regional-Rural" in the 1950s', Indian Economic Social History Review, vol. 49, no.

1, January–March, pp. 1-35.

Kiernan, V. (1971) Poems by Faiz, translated, with an introduction and notes, by

Victor G. Kiernan. London: George Allen and Unwin.

Laachir, K. (2016) 'The aesthetics and politics of "reading together" Moroccan novels

in Arabic and French', The Journal of North African Studies, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 1-15.

Orsini, F. (2002) 'India in the Mirror of World Fiction', New Left Review, vol. 13, pp.

75-88.

Prasad, G.J.V. 'Writing Translation: The Strange Case of the Indian English Novel', in

Bassnett, S. and Trivedi, H. (eds) Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice,

London: Routledge, 1999. Pp. 41–57.

Premchand. (1960 [1936]) Godaan. Allahabad: Sarasvati Press. Urdu edition

Gaudaan. Delhi: Jamia Millia, 1939. Translated from Hindiby Gordon Roadarmel,

The Gift of a Cow. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1968.

Premchand. (1928) Gosha-e ʻafiya. Lahore: Dar al-Ishat.

Premchand. (1962 [1921]) Premāśram. Allahabad: Hans Prakashan.

Premchand. (1989) The Chess Players and other screenplays. With a translation of

the short story by Rupert Snell. London: Faber.

Raza, R.M. (1992 [1966]) Adha gaon. New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan. Translated by

Gillian Wright as Rahi Masoom Reza, The Feuding Families of Vilage Gangauli.

New Delhi: Penguin India, 1994.

Renu, P. (1995) Maila anchal (1954), in Yayavar, B. (ed.) Racanavali, vol. 2, New

Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan.

Seth, V. (1999 [1993]) A Suitable Boy. London: Phoenix.

Shukla, S. (2003 [1968]) Rag darbari. New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan. Translated

by Gillian Wright as Shrilal Sukla, Raag Darbari. New Delhi: Penguin India,1992.

Singh, S. (1967) Alag alag vaitarani. Allahabad: Lokbharati Prakashan.

18

Srivastava, N. (2008) Secularism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel : National and

Cosmopolitan Narratives in English. London, New York: Routledge.

Talwar, V.B. (1990) Kisan, rashtriy andolan aur premchand: 1918-1922. Nai Dilli:

Northern Book Centre.